Press Releases

Rubicon Project Launches Project Awesome; New Innovation Advances Digital Advertising by Putting Consumers in Control of the Ads They Want to See or Not See

December 7, 2016

Hate Advertising? Want to Get Rid of that Creepy Ad that Follows You Around the Internet? Invite-Only Beta Aims to Improve Consumers’ Advertising Experience

LOS ANGELES – DECEMBER 7, 2016 – Today, Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI), which operates one of the largest advertising marketplaces in the world reaching more than 1 billion consumers across 1 million websites and 20,000 mobile apps, announced the private beta launch of a solution that puts consumers in control of their digital advertising experience. This launch is part of a broader corporate initiative that calls on the entire advertising industry to focus on keeping the Internet free and open, and fuel its growth by changing advertising for good.

“Our vision is to turn advertising into information and provide information as a service to consumers. We want to change advertising for good,” said Frank Addante, CEO and Founder of Rubicon Project. “We founded Rubicon Project with the mission of fueling the growth of the Internet by making advertising an effortless source of capital for innovators and content creators. There have always been three participants involved in advertising and for too long our industry has focused on the buyers and sellers and ignored consumers and their experience. The increasing adoption of ad blockers, privacy concerns and general apathy for ads, are symptoms of this lack of focus on the consumer experience. People recently have been given a choice with ad blockers, but their choice has been limited to either see all ads or block all ads. That’s not ideal for consumers, advertisers or publishers and application developers. Today we’re offering a new option, the ability to choose the specific ads and interests that you want to see or don’t want to see.”

To solve this, Rubicon Project has engineered a consumer solution that is designed to utilize the company’s machine learning technology to put people in control of their data, their privacy and their interests. Project Awesome will continually adapt and hone an individual user’s advertising experience based upon real-time feedback, personal interest profiles, and liked and disliked ad categories and creatives. The solution will also allow users to “snooze” and even block specific ads. The more a user utilizes the solution the better it gets at delivering more of the ads that the user wants, and less of the ads that the user does not want. Project Awesome will allow the more than 1 billion users reached by the Rubicon Project marketplace to share feedback on the ads they see in real-time and develop a taste profile in less than a minute.

Advertisers spend more than $500 billion dollars a year on ads, and the general sentiment is that people don’t like advertising. To date, ad blockers have been installed more than half a billion times worldwide on desktop and/or mobile devices. This reality presents a clear call-to-arms by users, who want advertisers, publishers and application developers to know that they will use whatever means necessary to control their digital advertising experience. The hundreds of ad blocking solutions that exist today only offer an all or nothing approach– users can block all ads or shut off blocking and receive all ads. However, advertising has the potential to deliver value to consumers. In a recent study conducted by Adobe, 78 percent of consumers noted that they liked personalized ads, but only 28 percent thought ads targeted to them were tailored correctly.

As Julie Brill, former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, noted in a keynote speech earlier this year, it is time that the advertising industry “explore the creation of innovative and usable tools to address consumer concerns about privacy. Not to find ways to work-around consumer choice, but provide consumers with something they clearly want: to see advertising that respects their privacy and that they can trust. Until that happens, more and more consumers will continue to take advantage of ad-blocking services.”

Project Awesome was built in Rubicon Project’s innovation lab, The Garage, and is designed to deliver a less arduous, more intuitive and engaging way for users to provide feedback on ads on and off the Rubicon Project exchange. The innovative user interface introduces the following key capabilities:

Snooze or block the ads you don’t want

Like the ads you do want

Save ads for later

Build a taste profile in 59 seconds

Search for specific categories and see ads tailored for your expressed interests